Guide to the Year's Work: General Materials

Five books are featured here in the general materials section: four monographs and one essay collection. The first two consider the wider cultural implications of the formal aspects of poetry, from prosody's role in the construction of English nationalism to the links between poetic form and Anglican worship. The third reexamines the links between literary canonization and class identification through close attention to the material and aesthetic circumstances of a range of "laboring-class" poets. The final two volumes elucidate surprising connections between Victorian poetry and the theories and personalities of nineteenth-century science, from psychology to chemistry to pure mathematics.

Meredith Martin's The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860-1930 (Princeton University Press, 2012) challenges traditional histories of disciplinary professionalism, literary periodicity, and English prosody, all by attempting "to alter our assumptions about English meter as a stable concept, to ask what else 'English' and 'meter' meant, and might mean" (p. 2). In Martin's revisionist account, meter, "stands for a host of evolving cultural concerns, including class mobility, imperialism, masculinity, labor, education, the role of classical and philological institutions, freedom, patriotism, national identification, and high art versus low art" (p. 4). Simplistic narratives of literary history grounded in a supposed "great divide" between Victorian and Modernist poetics do a grave disservice to the active heterogeneity of prosodic debate in the range of years identified in her subtitle. Since this "great divide" narrative is also predicated upon an understanding of poetic meter based upon "feet"—iambs, trochees, dactyls, anapests, and the like—it also unself-consciously reaffirms both a "military-metrical" complex associated with the competitive nationalism of World War I and "a perpetuation of the class differences in education" (pp. 130, 104). The book is divided into three sections of two chapters each: the first section reconstructs the rich variety of meters competing for a place within "English histories, grammars, and metrical studies" of the Victorian period, and includes a chapter devoted to the metrical experiments of Hopkins; Martin's second section "more specifically concerns the discourses of 'the learned'" (p. 8), including phonologists and linguists, and the impact of these discourses on patriotic schemes for public education; section three shows "how the pressure to conform to one model of English meter and English national identification produced fractures in the poetic-national identity of soldier poets in particular and, more broadly, reactionary misunderstandings about English metrical cultures for poets associated with the modernist avant-garde" (p. 12). The Rise and Fall of Meter addresses a broad range of prosodic theorists and poets, but recursively returns to the work of Robert Bridges, whom Martin identifies as "in many ways the book's protagonist" (p. 11), and whose poetry and poetics, she asserts, deserve far more prominence than they have been accorded in more conventional literary histories. Ultimately both an example of and an argument for a "historical prosody" that upends our "traditional approach to meter . . . to assume that it imposes 'order' onto emotions and onto experience," Martin's book requires us to ask what it means if "the allegory for 'order' is destabilized to begin with" (p. 203).

Adopting a bivalent definition of "form" as both "the steady and regular rhythms . . . the conventionality or otherwise of poetic language, verse form, and genre" and "any fixed aspect of worship . . . related to the performance of faith" (pp. 1, 6-7), Kirstie Blair's Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (Oxford University Press, 2012) reconstructs the "context of popular religious poetics . . . a vocabulary relating to contemporary religious debates that we have largely lost" within which "canonical poets . . . produced their religious poetry" (p. 5). Focusing on the years 1830-80, a span bounded roughly by Tractarianism and the Public Worship Regulation Act, Blair devotes her first three chapters to the imbricated spiritual and poetic aesthetics of the High Church movement, as expressed in texts like John Keble's The Christian Year (1827), which receives an extended close reading in chapter one; in Isaac Williams' The Cathedral (1838), which features largely within "the interlinked discourses of architecture, music, and poetics" of...